This invention concerns recycling of used tires and more particularly the chopping up of tires in order to facilitate recycling of the tires by reducing their bulk Also, chopped up tire materials are easier to handle than the tires themselves.
It has been the practice of retailers selling new tires to ship old tires to be scrapped to recycling facilities, but this entails the high costs of shipping and handling of the used tires by the tire retailers which significantly adds to their cost of doing business.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,551,325 it is proposed to provide an onsite tire chopping apparatus using cutters or alternatively a set of punches to punch out successive radial sections of each tire. However, the machine described therein requires indexing each tire about its center and cutting up of the outer perimeter into relatively large pieces, leaving the tire bead as a bulky separate item for disposal.
In addition, the indexing process to bring each tire section beneath the punch set makes the process relatively slow. Also, the machine and necessary collection containers take up valuable space within the retailer's facility. The pick up of the tire fragments typically will require storage within the facility and the necessity for further handling incidental to pick up of the stored material is an added burden.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a more rapid and complete chopping up of used tires.
It is another object to provide a tire chopping installation which is not required to be located within an existing building at the site where the tires are processed but where chopped up tire fragments can be conveniently stored and accessed for removal.